When Crab Was King: Faces of the Kodiak King Crab Fishery, 1950-1982

KMM is exhibiting a series of twenty-four photographic portraits of fishermen, processing workers, bartenders, store owners and ordinary people who lived through the boom years of the Kodiak King Crab Fishery, which lasted from the 1950s to 1982. Portraits are part of a King Crab exhibit which ran from May 7 to June 1, 2011, at the Baranov Musuem in Kodiak. Read the Curator's Statement below.

Curator’s Statement

As the King Crab fishery peaked in the mid-1960s, everyone in Kodiak knew that something extraordinary was happening. Millions of pounds of crabs were coming across the docks, new state of the art crab boats arrived every week, thousands of young people were suddenly in town, and fortunes were being made and spent with equal abandon. But while the work was lucrative- $100,000 crewshares were not unheard of- the fishery was extremely dangerous too, and boats and men were lost at sea on a regular basis every winter. These elements of youth and money and danger made Kodiak an exhilarating place to be.

And then, in 1982, it ended. The crab went away, for reasons still not fully understood. People moved on to other fisheries, to other occupations, or off the island. The fishermen got older and began raising families. The town quieted down. But the stories remained, filtering through the collective memory of Kodiak and other fishing communities along Alaska’s Gulf coast and down to Seattle, stories of huge catches and crazy paychecks, of wild behavior and hard, hard work, of being young and invincible, of a fishery that seemed at the time to be forever. It was that feeling, those stories, which Kodiak Maritime Museum has tried to capture in its oral history of the fishery, before the people who lived them went away themselves.

But while the oral history project has been very successful in preserving the stories and creating an audience for them in Kodiak and beyond, the museum realized early on that some visual element would help people more fully appreciate the Kodiak King Crab boom years. To that end, in 2010 museum staff began thinking about ways to show the faces of the people in the oral histories. The intent was to somehow present the congruence of the present and the past in each image- and the result became these middle aged or elderly men and women standing before the camera in a black and white present, their hands holding smaller color images of themselves taken decades before, when the crab fishery was booming and they were young themselves. Through the spring of 2011 museum staff worked with a local photographer, Alf Pryor, and dozens of Kodiak residents to produce the images you see here.

The staff and board of KMM strongly believe that a history museum must be not merely a keeper of the past, but also be relevant to the community it serves in the present. For communities to appreciate and value their history and culture, that history and culture must be nurtured and interpreted- the link between what was and what is must constantly be made new. Including communities in the process of interpreting their own past is a very good way to do that. When the people you see here came into the museum to record their voices and to make these images they became participants in the interpretive process itself. Their participation has enabled the museum to organically reconstruct and present the past they lived through from within the consciousness and memory of the community they are a part of.

"When Crab Was King" is one of many oral history projects nationwide which seek to record the first-hand experiences of commercial fishermen and their communities. Find more on the National Marine Fisheries Services "Voices from the Fisheries" website http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/voicesfromthefisheries/